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A renewed interest in lunar exploration with the focus on establishing a constant human presence on the Moon calls for developing new lunar human landing systems (HLS) which would deliver the crew from the prospective Lunar Gateway station to the surface of the Moon and back. Over the years, different human lunar lander architectures were proposed and multiple architecture studies were performed. However, those studies are relevant to the specific assumptions and lunar architectures proposed at the time of conducting the study. Since the current vision for lunar exploration includes new features, such as having the Lunar Gateway and switching to reusable systems, there is a need for a new HLS architecture study. Such studies are being performed by private companies; however, those are rarely publicly available. The goal of this paper is to address this gap and provide a publicly available architectural analysis within the current views on the future human lunar exploration. We assume the Lunar Gateway in an L2 near rectilinear halo orbit and a landing site at the lunar South Pole; the number of HLS crew of 4; the surface stay time of ~7 days, the payload mass delivered to the surface of 500 kg, and the payload mass returned from the surface of 250 kg. A set of parametric models including an HLS model and an HLS program cost model is developed for the analysis. 39 architectures with varying number of stages (1, 2, and 3 stages) and propellant combinations (LOX/LH2, LOX/CH4, and MMH/NTO) are explored. The Pareto analysis shows that there is a difference between typical performance trends for expendable and reusable architectures. For expendable architectures, the 2-stage option seems to be the most advantageous while, for reusable architectures, the 1- and 3-stage options are either comparable or win over the 2-stage option even for the number of system uses as low as 3. In terms of the propellant combinations, pure LOX/LH2 or combined LOX/LH2/LOX/CH4 architectures dominate the tradespace. Assuming that the inter-stage propellant compatibility is a preferred option for systems refueling from the Gateway, 1-stage and 3-stage all LOX/LH2 architectures are identified as the likeliest candidates to have lowest HLS-related production and launch costs. Further cost analysis of those two architectures shows that the 1-stage HLS wins over the 3-stage system in terms of the overall HLS program cost if a long-term exploration program (on the order of tens of missions) is assumed.

2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 11-16 July 2021, Brussels, Belgium, FSSCat, the “Federated Satellite Systems/ 3 Cat-5” mission was the winner of the 2017 ESA S^3 (Sentinel Small Satellite) Challenge and overall winner of the Copernicus Masters competition. FSSCat consists of two 6 unit cubesats carrying on board UPC's Flexible Microwave Payload - 2 (FMPL-2), an L-band microwave radiometer and GNSS-Reflectometer implemented in a software defined radio, and Cosine's HyperScout-2 visible and near infrared + thermal infrared hyperspectral imager, enhanced with PhiSat-1, a on board Artificial intelligence experiment for cloud detection. Both spacecrafts include optical and UHF inter-satellite links technology demonstrators, provided by Golbriak Space and UPC, respectively. This paper describes the mission, and the main scientific results of the FMPL-2 obtained during the first three months of the mission, notably the sea ice concentration and thickness, and the downscaled soil moisture products over the Northern hemisphere

This review paper analyzes technology trends observed in New Space missions, using a patent analytics approach. The analysis is complemented with a literature review of the subjects identified. The main objective of this review is to draw a comprehensive picture of technology trends in New Space and to discuss potential scenarios for further development of this novel type of missions. Building on the existing scientific literature, we survey alternative definitions and then propose our own definition of New Space missions as synthesis of the ongoing debate in the field. We identified more than two hundred organizations active in the development of both upstream and downstream products and services for New Space missions. Using a commercially available patent analytics tool, we collected 933 patents protecting technologies disclosed by those organizations. We used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, to analyze patents' data and to identify the underlying structures in New Space's technology trends. Ten major topics have been identified respectively named “Remote sensing & image acquisition”, “Flying/launch systems”, “Telecommunication systems”, “Constellation management”, “Digital Processing Architectures”, “Image analysis”, “Manufacturing process & materials”, “Feature recognition and extraction”, “Antenna systems”, and “Space platforms”. A deeper analysis of patents' claims revealed a core cluster defined as “data cluster” including data analysis topics (Remote sensing & image acquisition, Image analysis, and Feature recognition and extraction), data transmission topics (Telecommunication systems and Antenna systems from both hardware and software perspective) and related enabling technologies such as constellation management. Based on this analysis, the evolution of data cluster related technologies is surveyed in order to review the current technology state of the art as well as identifying potential areas that will benefit the most from further technology developments to improve New Space missions’ performance. Lastly, we identify technology trends for future New Space development based on the insights obtained by the synthesis of our literature and patent survey. We discuss the key directions for future development emerging from our review, such as the use of commercial off the shelf components, the increasing use of miniaturized technology, and software defined technology.

In the last years, the need to access Earth Observation high spatial resolution data with very low latency, ideally in near-real-time, has increased. Distributed Satellite Systems have emerged as an effective and efficient architecture to deal with these tight requirements. One of these systems is the Federated Satellite Systems which explore the benefits of sharing unused and available resources between satellites, such as memory storage or downlink opportunities. This interaction is known as satellite federations. Additional downlink contacts may enable low-latency communications and increase the downlink capacity. Therefore, the deployment of federations would allow satisfying current Earth Observation community demands. This work contributes to establish this promising paradigm by presenting a proof-of-concept of a federated system, called FSS Experiment payload. This payload is boarded into three stratospheric balloons, and it provides them communications means to create federations. The design of the payload, and the flight campaign results are presented in this work. These results demonstrate the feasibility of deploying federations, as well as the benefits of deploying them in future EO missions. This work has been funded by “CommSensLab” Excellence Research Unit Maria de Maeztu (MINECO grant MDM-2016-0600), and the Spanish Ministerio MICINN and EU ERDF project (RTI2018-099008-B-C21) “Sensing with pioneering opportunistic techniques” by the grant FI-DGR 2015 of AGAUR - Generalitat de Catalunya (FEDER). The authors would like to acknowledge Skoltech and all the students that with their passion have made possible this balloon campaign.

Data is the most valuable asset in space. It is produced by communicating and observing payloads, then downlinked to ground stations, and eventually delivered to the users, who generate information and insights from it. This paper explores an alternative avenue for the exploitation of space data, with the concept of Space Cloud. The space cloud is an orbiting cloud computing infrastructure providing in-orbit data storage and processing services. The idea is to enable on-orbit decision making including reactive planning and scheduling decisions, as well as complex resource management in space networks. The space cloud is the missing element to enable efficient and reliable intersatellite connectivity on top of which a whole new set of services and opportunities can be built in a similar fashion to what happened for the Internet during the 1990s. Building on previous work by the authors, this paper illustrates new efforts for the development of the space cloud concept through the demonstration of optical communication technology as a backbone for cloud computing in space. We illustrate how optical communications technology is an enabler of future space clouds.

We present the preliminary results of our investigation on the effectiveness of the Serum methodology for Agile development of space hardware. We analyze the development process of a hardware payload that is part of a host nanosatellite mission composed of two 6U CubeSats (30cm x 20cm x 10cm). The host mission is a collaboration with several partners including academia and small and medium enterprises. Scrum is a product development process created as a faster, more effective way of developing software. The goal of our investigation is to understand whether and by how much the same Scrum principles that proved successful in software can be adopted vis-a-vis in hardware projects. We also intend to identify the fundamental challenges in such an approach for space missions. In the host mission, Scrum has been adopted for the development of the payload subject to the investigation. The paper introduces the ongoing development process and identifies Scrum-related challenges internal to the payload development and challenges related to the coordination of the process with partners adopting established development processes. The paper identifies opportunities of future work for the fine tuning of Agile development methodologies in space projects and illustrates key statistics that have been collected throughout the development so far.

Both startups and traditional space industry are exploring new business opportunities and new engineering approaches in what is becoming known now as New Space.

In recent years, the engineering community realized the potential for additive manufacturing (AM) to be a game-changer in product development. Nevertheless, it is not yet possible to fully take advantage of this technology because it implies a different approach to engineering design. The dependencies of AM on related technologies, such as material modeling, design tools, computing, and process design represent a challenge for engineers. A comprehensive system engineering approach is needed to address the introduction of AM in new design projects. This article proposes a systems design approach to evaluate the use of AM in the development of new systems at the early stage of design. The methodology aims to provide a preliminary estimation of performance, cost, and time of parts manufactured using additive techniques. The article introduces a set of design drivers and criteria to standardize the design process and support the manufacturing technique decision-making process. The methodology is experimentally tested and validated by evaluating tradeoffs for two different case studies considering different engineering parameters. The analysis of the results shows a good consistency between framework predictions and experimental evidence, with an uncertainty level lower than 5%. The reliability of obtained results is discussed.

During these years, novel Distributed Satellite Systems (DSS) have addressed the new Earth Observation (EO) requirements (e.g. near-real time access to data, or multi-point observations). One of the DSS proposals is the concept of Federated Satellite System (FSS) which has explored the benefits of sharing available and unused resources between satellite to maximize the system utility. The possibility to use additional downlink opportunities thanks to federations is a resource that could improve current EO missions, and thus achieving the required performance. For that reason, the FSS Experiment payload has been implemented as a FSS proof-of-concept between 6-Unit CubeSats in the FSSCAT mission. This article presents the design, and the test results of this payload demonstrating its feasibility for future EO missions.

FSSCAT is an innovative mission concept consisting of two federated 6U Cubesats in support of the Copernicus Land and Marine Environment services. The first CubeSat carries the Flexible Microwave Payload-2 (FMPL-2), a dual microwave payload (a GNSS-Reflectometer and an L-band radiometer with interference detection/mitigation), and the second one a hyper-spectral optical payload. The combined use of these payloads will allow to measure soil moisture, ice extent, and ice thickness, and to detect melting ponds over ice. FSSCAT also includes radio and optical inter-satellite links to test some of the techniques and technologies for the upcoming satellite federations. FSSCAT will be the precursor of a constellation of federated small satellites for Earth observation achieving high temporal resolution and moderate spatial resolution in a cost-effective manner.